Do not update your Windows 10 machine with the latest October Windows 10 update release 1809 as there are reports of the update removing critical system files after updating.

Microsoft has confirmed a bug contained within the latest Windows 10 October update 1809 to delete random files. This has resulted in the update to have been caused by Microsoft and recently suspended.

According to Microsoft only a “handful” of users have reported file deletion, however given the scale of how quickly the news has hit the internet, I would hazard a guess and say “a significantly large number” would have been much closer to the truth (or the majority of users!).

Microsoft is has now begun re-releasing the Windows 10 October update, but I would wait at least seven days from today to ensure this second update doesn’t contain the identical bug or if Microsoft has introduced a new bug in the re-release.

Whats New in the Update?

Here is a great video outlining the top 7 features of the new Windows October 10 update:

The features are mostly aesthetic and do not feature any performance gains or boosts.

Here are the features listed with a short description of each:

Clipboard History

Make Windows Apps Black

Swiftkey Keyboard

New Screenshot Grabber

Better Predictive Restart Engine

Your Phone App

Font Size Slider

Clipboard History

A new shortcut to learn and master! Windows Key + V. Pretty cool feature I must say, it maintains a history of all your Copy/Pastes as opposed to just remembering the most recent! This I can see as being quite handy as opposed to having a number of Word docs open containing random copy/paste data.

Hit the Windows key and the V key to see your clipboard history, where you can paste any of the items or pin them or delete them. Super useful.

To enable clipboard history and sync, go to Settings > System > Clipboard and toggle on Clipboard history and Syncacross devices.

You can Make Windows go Black

Simply make all the Windows apps go black. I don’t see the purpose of this except maybe an energy saving initiative as it requires your computer use less energy to display black electrons as opposed to white electrons on your computer monitor.

SwiftKey Keyboard

To be honest with you, I have a non-touch Windows desktop computer so I can not utilise this feature. If anyone has a touchscreen desktop or laptop please provide some comments and I will update this blog post with your feedback!

New Screenshot Grabber

Snipping Tool is now out of the picture and Snip & Sketch is in. Snip & Sketch is the new snipping tool. It is now even easier to use, but it still lacks an important feature that third party screenshot grabbing tools all have: Capture Entire Window Screen

Snip & Sketch also now comes with the support of the key PrtScr or PntScn to open up the snipping tool.

Less Restart Requests After Every Single Update

How annoying can Windows be when your in the middle of something important then it suddenly requests a computer restart out of nowhere? With this new update, Windows gets better at being more selective as to when it should prompt you to restart your computer.

How good this feature will be is yet to be determined.

Your Phone App

If you have a Android powered mobile phone then this feature will allow you to view all photos on your mobile phone on your Windows 10 desktop or laptop PC with drag-drop access! You can forget having to constantly email yourself photos.

Still nothing of the sort for iPhone users though.

Font Size Slider

Windows 10 October update now adds a new control where you can set the scaling the size of fonts separately from scaling other text, icons and the like.

Go to Settings > Ease of Access > Display to Make text bigger.

Do I Need to Update?

Typically, I tend to live by the rule: “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and this couldn’t have been further from the truth in this instance. If your computer is running just fine, I would avoid the update. However if any update from Microsoft contains security flaw fixes, I would update immediately.

I can see how some of the new features would tempt you into updating, but I think we can learn from Microsoft’s mistakes and wait a few days after a Windows update release to avoid potential headaches.

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